In restorative dentistry, tooth shapes are typically generated based on a small set of sample tooth shapes called library teeth. Such library teeth are stored in tooth libraries and manipulated using 3D digital editing techniques that are equivalent to the physical processes of sculpting in wax and clay (i.e., by adding or removing material digitally from areas on the surface of the model in a manner analogous to adding or removing wax in physical modeling). This allows for a wide variation, but provides no means for assuring that the result continues to be a natural tooth shape. Techniques for making the tooth models using statistical techniques have been described by the present inventors in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/609,774, filed Jan. 30, 2015, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. However, to the inventors' knowledge, such statistical techniques have not been applied to the creation of bridges and arch models encompassing multiple teeth. As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, bridges and arches are significantly more complicated than crowns as there are additional anatomical constraints amongst the respective teeth in the arch model.
Advances in digital dentistry have made available a lot of software tools in restorative dentistry for performing functions from implant planning to crown design. Although these software tools facilitate complicated dental process with higher precision, manipulating these tools often still requires skilled dental professionals to perform certain operations in a specific way within the range a tool allows. For example, it is hard to find a software tool that is able to create a complete crown restoration for a sequence of two or more missing teeth in a fully automatic manner. Two of the fundamental technical challenges that make such automatic generation of restoration very difficult are obtaining dentition information of a scanned (digitized) dental arch and enforcing anatomical constraints between the consecutive restorative units using an automatic computerized process.
Partially addressing these problems, in earlier work the inventors developed an algorithm to build an anatomical crown model called ACM based on a statistical analysis of many real tooth samples of each tooth type. ACM has been proven to be an effective morphable crown model that can be used in both interactive crown design and automated crown initialization. However, there is a lack of proper support in the model to represent the relationship of two or more consecutive tooth units in a dental arch. Methods are needed for better addressing the challenges presented when modeling the relationship of two or more consecutive tooth units in a dental arch. The invention addresses these and other needs in the art.